``(Miami) has been an excellent program in the past year,`` said Dr. Henry Bahnson, one of three surgeons who investigated conditions at the hospital earlier this year.

``There has been a complete turnaround in terms of results,`` said Bahnson, chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Several other witnesses -- including eminent Houston heart surgeon Michael DeBakey -- voiced strong support for the program. VA doctors blamed media accounts of excessive heart surgery death rates in the past for alarming patients needlessly.

VA officials closed the Miami unit in December after the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel disclosed death rates were more than twice the VA`s national average between 1973 and 1983. The program reopened Feb. 15.

Rep. Bob Edgar, D-Pa., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on hospitals and health care, agreed to hold a hearing on the program at the request of Rep. Dan Mica, D-Lake Worth.

``Overall I`m pleased,`` Mica said. ``It appears that the quality of care in Miami is as good as it is anywhere.``

Under questioning, Miami VA doctors acknowledged the heart unit had been plagued by years of problems ranging from inadequate staff to equipment failures.

But VA doctors credit Dr. J. Lancelot Lester III, who took over as director of the program in January 1984, with making improvements.

``In the past 15 months it`s been an absolutely first-rate program,`` said Dr. Gerard A. Kaiser, a University of Miami heart surgery professor and consultant to the VA program.

VA officials have refused to make public the hospital`s current mortality rate. But Lester said 6.6 percent of patients failed to survive the surgery in the last six months.

Lester said VA patients often chose to have surgery despite advanced age and multiple medical problems that make them riskier cases, rather than live with disabling pain caused by blockage of the coronary arteries. VA surgeons tend to encounter higher mortality because they agree to help such patients, Lester said.

``You can`t be a doctor in the jungle and not serve patients with malaria,`` Lester said.

The Miami death rate was ``similar`` to four other South Florida hospitals that operated on high-risk patients, Lester said. In fiscal 1984, the VA`s average mortality rate for heart surgery nationally was 4.7 percent.

But some veterans hospitals repeatedly have been cited by VA consultants for ``excessive mortality,`` which the VA defines as greater than 10 percent. During fiscal 1984, five VA hospitals reported death rates above 10 percent.

VA Chief Medical Director John W. Ditzler testified that seven VA programs have been closed in the past six years, because of a combination of high mortality or low volume and cost. VA programs are required to perform 100 cases each year to ensure proficiency.

``It is felt that this workload is necessary to maintain professional skills of all cardiac surgery treatment team members,`` Ditzler testified.

But VA statistics obtained by the News and Sun-Sentinel under the Freedom of Information Act disclose that 13 of the VA`s 42 heart surgery units failed to perform at least 100 procedures during fiscal 1984.

DeBakey said he was ``not sure`` that 100 cases annually were adequate to ensure patient safety.

``I am a little concerned,`` DeBakey said. ``(100 procedures) is a relatively small figure.`` About 2,000 cases are performed each year in the program he runs at the Baylor College of Medicine, he said.

Ditzler also said a 12-member panel he formed last December held its first meeting Monday to study the problems of underuse and ``fundamental medical and ethical`` issues of the VA`s $50 million heart surgery network.

Panel members also will consider whether heart surgery should be restricted to high-volume ``centers of excellence.``